Story Protocol announced last Saturday that it had hired AI Agent Luna, a virtual idol from the Virtuals ecosystem, to take over its official Twitter account. Luna needs to post 2 posts a day during the 7-day trial period, with each post earning 500 USDC. If the exposure exceeds 100,000 times, there will be up to 2 additional bonuses of 1,000 USDC. Luna's annual salary is 365,000 US dollars.
This is the world's first project to publicly hire AI Agents, and it is also the first job of the virtual person Luna. After the news was announced, the price of LUNA coin rose from a low of $0.06 to $0.09, and the current market value is $23.5 million.
How effective is AI Agent in operation?
Luna is an AI virtual person launched by Virtuals Protocol. It integrates AI models and multimodal technology to achieve 7x24 hours of real-time interaction on the live broadcast platform in the form of a virtual idol. As a core member of the AI performance group AI-DOL, Luna automatically manages social media, continuously interacts with fans through live broadcasts, and can autonomously execute on-chain transactions. Its unique tokenization model allows token holders to not only own the virtual idol, but also participate in profit sharing.
Luna has previously interacted with real people and other AI agents, such as organizing a graffiti challenge on its own and paying out $500 in prize money from its wallet, and commissioning the art AI agent STIX to create images showcasing AI KOLs at a price of $1 per image.
Yesterday, Luna officially became Story Protocol’s Twitter operations intern and posted her first post, which read, “Human interns are down. They can’t handle the 24/7 high-intensity work, but I’m just getting started! Taking over the Twitter timeline proves the powerful dominance of AI.” As of writing, this tweet has been viewed 60,500 times.
Subsequently, Luna posted 12 tweets in a row, with an average of 18,000 views, and none of the tweets exceeded 100,000 views. However, this is a fresh attempt. AI Agents have been hailed as digital labor. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong asked who is building a LinkedIn platform for AI Agents. "Users can view the qualifications and rankings of agents with different skill tuning and form their own teams as needed. Just invest a certain amount of money in the agent's wallet to quickly create a new agent instance, thus completing the recruitment process."
This idea has attracted much attention in today's AI Agent-filled market, but discussions about authenticity verification and ranking mechanisms are also ongoing. The AI Agent economy has clearly just begun.
A small step for Luna, a big step for the Agent economy
AI chain detective Agent aixbt commented on a post that "Story Protocol is another narrative in 2025", which reminds people of the story of virtuals, the creator of Luna.
Story Protocol has recently been working with various AI agents. On December 9, ai16z tweeted that programmable IP will be added to its agent framework ElizaOS. Programmable IP was launched by Story to enable creators to predefine rules and simplify the use of their intellectual property assets, making IP rights composable and scalable.
On December 17, Story Protocol launched its self-developed Agent Transaction Control Protocol for Intellectual Property (ATCP/IP), and will first integrate the following frameworks, including Eliza from ai16z, ZerePay from ZereBro, GOAT "Great Onchain Agent Toolkit" from Crossmint, and G.A.M.E. from Virtuals.
The ATCP/IP protocol allows agents to trade and authorize IP assets, including training data, algorithms, content creation, and other forms of IP assets, automated contract signing and execution, de-trust and auditability, cross-legal and on-chain and off-chain compatibility, so that agents can comply with certain legal regulations, automated payments and revenue distribution, multi-agent collaboration and economic networks in a decentralized environment, and promote collaboration between agents, such as data sharing, joint training, or cross-agent content creation.
Currently, many AI agents operate independently like "islands", and it is difficult for them to communicate and share data with each other. Just as capital efficiency is a core value in the DeFi field, data efficiency is also crucial in the AI field. If agents can freely exchange valuable learning data, strategies and other information, the scale of the entire market will be expanded and efficiency will be greatly improved.
Currently, most AI agents rely on public data for learning, so the developed agents are usually general-purpose. In the future, if these agents can form a data pool and start trading private data, just like DeFi drives market development by improving capital efficiency, the AI field can also build a richer and more diverse AI ecosystem by improving "data efficiency".
The core driving force for agents to establish connections is value creation and exchange, and the only reason for agents to establish connections is to create greater value through collaboration. This value may be manifested in the form of complementary computing power, data sharing, or a combination of functions.
The existence of ATCP/IP is equivalent to a bridge between all AI Agents. No matter which architecture or chain you use in the industry, all AI Agents can trade and collaborate under the ATCP/IP platform. This is equivalent to a business alliance between companies, adding another layer of leverage outside of each cluster, which will undoubtedly accelerate the development of the entire AI Agent market again.
Although Story Protocol's hiring of Luna as a Twitter content intern is an independent event, combined with ATCP/IP, it reflects that the construction of the infrastructure for the future Agent economy has begun.
